Lennart Nacke’s second-week lecture from his Basic Introduction to Game Design course walks through the Rules of Play lens on games: a game is a closed formal system that subjectively represents a subset of reality. Rather than debating what a game “is,” it lays out the eight formal elements every game is built from — and how their relationships create gameplay.
The four system ingredients (Littlejohn & Foss, via Rules of Play):
- Objects — the elements, variables, or parts of the system
- Attributes — the properties those objects can have
- Internal relationships — how objects affect one another
- Environment — the surrounding context that influences the system
The formal elements:
- Players — voluntary participants; the lusory attitude and invitation to play let them enter the Magic Circle
- Objectives — the best goals seem attainable but stay challenging: Capture, Chase, Race, Alignment, Rescue/Escape, Forbidden Act, Construction, Exploration, Solution, Outwit
- Procedures — allowed actions: who does what, where, when, how (starting, progression, special, resolving)
- Rules — define what players can and cannot do; “every game is its rules” (Parlett)
- Resources — value = scarcity × utility: lives, units, health, currency, actions, inventory, time
- Conflict — obstacles, opponents, dilemmas
- Boundaries — the separation of the game world from the real world
- Outcome — must be uncertain to sustain interest; winning conditions differ from player objectives
Games can be framed as formal, cultural, or experiential systems, and the framings nest: formal systems are closed and analysable independent of context, experiential systems can be open, and a cultural system encompasses both. Which frame you pick changes how you critique a game.
The takeaway: there is no progress in exhaustively defining what a game is. The value is the vocabulary — formal elements only matter through their internal relationships, and combining them is what produces novel interaction and meaningful decisions.